It's just like a plate of boardinghouse hash that never has been sold

[austin_dern]

The DVD stores weren't the only things closing from the nearby mall. As part of Borders's bankruptcy the local outlet is closing down, and I've been going in pretty much each week before yoga to see what looked interesting at the current discount rate.

As of last Wednesday they'd reached the 40-to-50 percent discount mark, and were pricing the shelves at as little as $60 per shelf. The remaining stock had also contracted dramatically: the week before they were still putting stuff on both levels of the floor, even if the lowest shelves an the highest had been emptied out. That actually made the store arguably more comfortable to browse since there wasn't the need for kneeling down or for standing on tip-toes to see everything, even if the available stock had dwindled. That week they also had the ``down'' escalator out of order, but kept the ``up'' escalator running, with signs saying that people should use the elevator to get back down. I suppose at least that gave me the chance to try out their elevator.

But now the stock's dwindled to a single floor, with desperate hand-written attempts to label the sections in their new places correctly. It's doing terrible things to my effort to bring my Strategic Reserve Reading Pile under control, but it isn't like the books are going to spoil before I read them, right?

I haven't seen any signs about the final closing, so I don't know this week what the discount will be or what if any stock will be left.

Trivia: The settling of the Swedish colony on the Delaware river in March 1638 was lead by Peter Minuit, the German native of French ancestry renowned for the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. Source: The Island At The Centre Of the World: The Untold Story Of The Founding Of New York, Russell Shorto.

Currently Reading: The Story Of Maps, Lloyd A Brown. This is kind of a slog, I suppose because the meat of this book (written about sixty years ago) --- providing a general history of mapping --- has been done since and I've read many of those books. But you can't justly blame a pioneer book filling a gap because you liked the later books better. (And some of the narratives I'd have found more fascinating if I didn't know them well enough already.)

Comments

[mondhasen.livejournal.com]

"The Island At The Centre Of the World: The Untold Story Of The Founding Of New York, Russell Shorto."

That's a book I should look into to read what is mentioned of Gysbert op Dyck, original grantee* of Coney Island. Heirs of op Dyck's are sprinkled throughout local history, including the ownership of the now 'flop-house' Greenwich Hotel (op Dyck being remembered there only through the Anglicized Updike surname given to the seedy art deco bar in the front of the building, which may or may not still be in use as I haven't gone there in years. The whole building was once the Hotel Updike).

*Thank Google Books for this quick ref to "New Amsterdam and its people: studies, social and topographical, of the town ..." By John H. Innes

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

My casual search of the index turns up just the one reference to Gysbert op Dyck, in the context of negotiations with New Haven and Connecticut (chapter 12, page 309 in my edition):

Here Stuyvesant alighted from his ship in September 1650, pegged up the quay, no doubt greeted Gysbert op Dyck, the commander of the Dutch fort, and moved on to meet his four fellow statesmen. With him as secretaries and interpreters were two Englishmen, George Baxter and Thomas Willett; had things gone differently, this no doubt would have been an occasion where he would have relied on Van der Donck.

I don't see an entry for Coney Island in the index, which is bizarre, if for no other reason than that I know I've passages about it in the book.

(I should check what Gotham has to say, but that was written before anyone noticed that they did so have records of the Dutch era.)

[mondhasen.livejournal.com]

Thanks for checking that out. I was doing graveyard research (trying to determine which Shippee family members were buried in the plots on my parents' property) and read about op Dyck on a side path. There's a bloodline connection somewhere along the way to the Shippee family.

There is, I fear, a huge gap in my own knowledge of the events in the Americas between 1620 and 1776. It's gotten down to "The Pilgrims landed, there was trouble with the French, England became an oppressor, and a tea party went bad." Then written history begins again ;o)

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Oh, it's more "There were troubles with the Indians, trouble with the French, trouble with the French AND the Indians." :)

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but that's the New England view of things. Toward the Mid-Atlantic states you get the Dutch and even Sweden involved. North Carolina even got a Swiss-backed colony and what the heck they were doing is a real mystery.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

It's a tough era to get a handle on. For one, most Popular US History likes to begin at the Revolutionary War, or at least at the Proclamation Line of 1763 (as the logical starting point for that), and it gets lost that there's almost as many decades of European-based history before then as there was after then in the Future United States territory.

For another, well, there's not the sort of National Narrative that gets used for the default United States history. You barely hear of the territories taken from Mexico when they were Spanish, for example, or even much before 1846 anyway. But even if you take the English colonies ... the experience of the colonies that merged into Connecticut were fundamentally different from those of the two Jerseys, or Philadelphia. You really have to learn a couple dozen local narratives before they come together.

[lexomatic.livejournal.com]

::: ... most Popular US History likes to begin at the Revolutionary War ...

Well, a history course has to pick somewhere to put limits, because if the human race doesn't have too much history by now, eventually it will. It was easy enough when there were very few people leaving very few records, plus everybody else who European-history-writers hadn't noticed, but then we had population and info-storage explosions. There's a whole lot more interaction between cultural test-tubes.

If the purpose of history is to "avoid repeating it," then courses will have to take a statistical view: not "this is why the U.S. involvement in Vietnam was a problem" or even "never embark on a land war in Asia" but "under these circumstances, this may be expected to happen." Like an Ideal Gas Law (PV=nRT) for human behavior, one that summarizes oodles of separate experiments. Even enumerating Key Historical Figures will become excessive.

Imagine the trouble that far-future SF civilizations would/will have! Ten thousand years in the future and the tutors of young Paul Atreides try to trace from the Trojan War, Europe, spaceflight, interstellar colonization, the age when Machines Ruled, the formation of the Imperium, etc.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

They do have to start somewhere, and they do have to pick what to include and what to leave out. But the trouble is when they all pick the same stuff to include and leave out: you end up thinking the whole content of English colonization in the United States, 1583-1776, was, ``Roanoke fails, Jamestown barely doesn't quite starve to death, Pilgrims, Thanksgiving, Intolerable Acts''.

Granted it's hard making all the experiences into a National Narrative, the way that (say) the Revolutionary War or Civil War do, but there were important influences on how the colonists thought of themselves which resulted from, for example, King Philip's War, or the general neglect all the colonies received during the Civil War and Protectorate, and it distorts what the Declaration of Independence was to not even have heard of the Glorious Revolution.

I grant one purpose of history can be to avoid repeating its mistakes, or better to emphasize its successes; however, you can pretty much find historic precedent proving any course of action is correct, incorrect, brilliant, and tragically misguided. But just learning the context of why-things-are, or why-they're-not-different, has to be worth something. Stuff happened: the European colonists ceased to be European for reasons of shared experience rather than just because they never saw the crown for different reasons than most Europeans never saw the crown.

One of the curious side beats in the history of statistical mechanics --- and which is barely mentioned in histories of science --- is that almost from the moment that the kinetic theory of gases started proving itself people started guessing there should be an ``ideal gas law'' for human dynamics. Asimov made it most famous, of course, but Gibbs was there first; he just didn't know what to make of it. (There are also what are clearly recognizably predictions of the Singularity going back as far as the 1920s!)